Cellular telephone systems are well known. In many parts of the world, including the United States, cellular systems now provide two-way telecommunications capability that is regularly provided elsewhere by land-line telephone systems. In addition to voice communications, cellular telephone systems also carry facsimile message traffic.
In a fax transmission, a page of a document is optically scanned to produce electronic signals representative of the page's image. The signals are transferred across a switching network to another fax machine whereat the electronic signals from the first fax machine are processed to reproduce a near-perfect likeness of the document page that was optically scanned by the fax machine at the sending end.
Fax transmission in the U.S. and elsewhere comply with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) standard no. ITU-T.30. ITU standards are readily available from the ITU web site at www.itu.org.
A problem with sending a fax transmission via a CDMA wireless network is that most fax transmissions are indeed analog signals comprised of tones that represent the images on a page being copied and transmitted. Stated alternatively, fax transmissions on a wireline communications system comply with T.30; fax transmissions on a wireless CDMA system comply with a different standard known as the I707 standard for CDMA cellular systems, which is a digital system. Accordingly, when transmitting a fax over CDMA, the analog ITU-T.30 fax protocol must be converted during the transmission process to a digital standard or protocol by which the analog fax signals can be carried over a digital cellular transport. Transmitting an analog fax over a CDMA cellular system also requires that certain control messages sent between the fax machines be completely assembled at the CDMA gateways, thereby increasing the time required to complete a fax transmission.
A method of reducing an analog fax transmission over a CDMA cellular system would be an improvement over the prior art.